Video Indexer

At Microsoft, our mission is to empower every person and organization on the planet to achieve more. The media industry exemplifies this mission; We live in an age where more content is being created and consumed in more ways and on more devices than ever.

Microsoft Azure Media Services Video Indexer (VI) enables the customization of language models by allowing customers to upload examples of sentences or words belonging to the vocabulary of their specific use case. Since speech recognition can sometimes be tricky, VI enables you to train and adapt the models for your specific domain.

After sweeping up multiple awards with the general availability release of Azure Media Services’ Video Indexer, including the 2018 IABM for innovation in content management and the prestigious Peter Wayne award, the team has remained focused on building a wealth of new features and models to allow any organization with a large archive of media content to unlock insights from their content.

Video Indexer is designed to extract deep insights from video and audio files offline in order to analyze a given media file already created in advance. However, for some use cases it's important to get the media insights from a live feed as quick as possible to unlock operational and other use cases pressed in time.

Any organization that has a large media archive struggles with the same challenge – how can we transform our media archives into business value? Media content management is hard, and so is content discovery at scale. Content categorization by topics is an intuitive approach that makes it easier for people to search for the content they need.

As it turns out, Microsoft News has been working for years on some pretty advanced algorithms that analyze their articles and determine how to increase personalization, which ultimately increases consumption. However, when I asked them if there were any gaps, they were quick to answer that they would love more insights on their videos.

Content creators and broadcasters are increasingly embracing Cloud’s global reach, hybrid model and elastic scale. These attributes combined with AI’s ability to accelerate insights and time to market across content creation, management, and monetization are truly transformative.

Earlier today, we announced Video Indexer as generally available. This means that our customers can count on all the metadata goodness of Video Indexer to always be available for them to use to run their business.